Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism

by Seyward Darby

Most tradwives are white, and they embrace a dream of comfort, contentment, and affluence specific to lived white experiences. It’s a reverie in which the diversifying of culture—from fashion to music, social perspectives to religious beliefs—never happened. To be sure, not every tradwife is a white supremacist, but the community’s hunger for the distinct boundaries of the past makes it vulnerable to far-right messaging. Tradwives and white nationalists share core objectives (more babies), myths (America’s moral decline), and iconography (happy heterosexual families). Such close proximity, particularly on social media, makes the exchange of ideas a straightforward prospect. When a tradwife mentions threats to “European culture” and “Western civilization,” she’s borrowing euphemistic language from white nationalists. When she talks about protecting her children from multiculturalism and black-on-white crime, she’s all but reading from the hate movement’s proverbial handbook.